Is Ohio the Next Home Of Hanging Chads?

Columbus, Ohio—In America’s quintessential swing state, aging voting machines and partisan battles are casting doubt over the fairness of the 2016 election. Immediately after the 2004 election, when tens of thousands of Ohioans waited hours to vote, the state enacted a series of reforms that began to address the worst of that year’s nightmares. But now much of that progress is in danger of being undone.

The Buckeye State is far from alone. Politicians and advocates are waging similar battles across the country, but the stakes may be highest here, in perhaps the most important of swing states on the national electoral map. With voting laws in flux and funding a for better voting technology a constant struggle nationwide, two central questions remain just 14 months before Election Day: who will be able to vote, and will all their votes be counted accurately?

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In 2005, Ohio passed a sweeping bill that expanded early and absentee voting, and a series of legal settlements in the following years helped put in place some of the nation’s best electoral practices. But over the past few years, Republicans have been chipping away at many of those changes. GOP leaders say they’re simply trying to guarantee uniformity and prevent voter fraud, but voting rights advocacy groups say the recent changes threaten to bring back problems from the past, and may be driven by an effort to suppress voter turnout.

Meanwhile, Ohio leaders are largely ignoring what a bipartisan federal panel called an “impending crisis:” voting equipment that’s at least a decade old and in need of replacement. Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted sounded the alarm two years ago in testimony before President Obama’s bipartisan Presidential Commission on Election Administration. “The next time we go to the polls to elect a president, these machines will be 12 years old,” he said. “That's a lifetime when it comes to technology.”

Yet his office has failed to forward any plan to replace the equipment, leaving cash-strapped counties to devise their own solutions. In the rolling farmland of Ohio’s Amish Country, for example, the Holmes County Board of Elections is strategically pinching pennies—holding off purchases of printers and other items—in hopes the county can scrounge together a few hundred thousand dollars to replace its aging voting equipment. And Holmes is actually one of the few counties that have any plan.

This crisis has its roots in the solution to a previous problem. The 2002 Help America Vote Act provided more than $3 billion to help states purchase new equipment, and the majority of local jurisdictions bought replacements over the next few years—mostly either touch-screen devices or optical scan machines that record votes from a paper ballot. The result is that, with rare exceptions, the country’s voting machines are all aging out at the same time.

From Cleveland to Cincinnati, Toledo to Dayton, the stories are similar. Most of the state’s 88 counties share these election-related dilemmas. Considering that no presidential candidate has won since 1960 without winning Ohio, these struggles over the fine details of the voting process may go a long way toward determining the outcome of next November’s presidential election.

We’ve seen the nightmare scenario before: back to November of 2000 when an unusually close race between George W. Bush and Al Gore led to a contested recount in Florida and the indelible image of bug-eyed election officials peering at “hanging chads.” The question now is whether Ohio, or any number of other states facing similar battles, is prepared to handle a similar situation any better in November of 2016.

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Today’s fights over the nation’s electoral rules and the sorry state of its voting infrastructure clearly trace back to the 2000 election, when the two parties saw the advantages of nudging electoral laws in their favor.

“We’re in a highly partisan atmosphere now so that leads to more fights and litigation,” says Richard L. Hasen, an expert in election law at the University of California, Irvine School of Law. Hasen says that partisanship, along with a trend since 2000 toward closer presidential elections and a couple of key Supreme Court decisions on voting law, has led to more fights between the parties over arcane rules and “an increased churn and question of how far these voting changes can go.”

The 2000 election also exposed the need to modernize voting infrastructure. The Help America Vote Act of 2002 made a number of changes to the nation’s voting system; chief among them was creation of the federal Election Assistance Commission, or EAC, which was charged with setting voluntary standards for new voting machines to replace the punch-card systems, ostensibly heading off another “hanging chad” disaster.

In 2004, though, problems emerged again, this time in Ohio, where a combination of robust turnout and poor planning and administration led to long lines at polls. Some people in Knox County, near Kenyon College, waited as many as 10 hours to vote. Despite a margin of victory of less than 120,000 votes out of 5.6 million cast and widespread concerns among Democrats that the lines and other problems had sullied the vote, John Kerry conceded the state to Bush the day after the election (he later supported a recount, which confirmed Bush’s win).

In the ensuing years, the ills of the nation’s voting system drew increasing scrutiny from the political parties, advocacy groups and academics, with the clearest symptom of those ills being lines at the polls. While most people do not wait long to vote, lines have persisted in some locales, leading to the loss of some 500,000 to 700,000 votes in 2012, according to an analysis by Charles Stewart III, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Stephen Ansolabehere, of Harvard University. Voters in Florida waited an average of about 40 minutes that year, the longest in the nation.

Those lines prompted Barack Obama in 2013 to appoint the Presidential Commission on Election Administration, which held a series of hearings and pulled together relevant research to create a list of best practices. The commission noted that many issues—a dearth of data, uneven resource allocation, poorly maintained registration rolls—were rooted in the system’s decentralization, and it published a lengthy list of recommendations, including allowing people to register to vote online and expanding early voting opportunities. But perhaps nothing the commission said was more unsettling than the “impending crisis” it identified with the nation’s aging voting infrastructure.

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Halfway between Columbus and Cleveland, the Holmes County Board of Elections occupies a windowless room with high ceilings in a one-story building it shares with other county offices in Millersburg, in the heart of Ohio’s Amish Country. The county seat, with some 3,000 residents, has a compact downtown of mostly red-brick buildings, some old and bright and some, like the elections building, made of newer, duller bricks that don’t quite fit in.

On a bright June morning the room served as staging ground for a public voting machine test, which counties must perform ahead of each election. No one showed up to watch, but at 10 a.m., part-time staffer Betsy Hall began setting up an AccuVote TSX, the county’s electronic voting machine. As Hall labored with the contraption, which looks like an oversized and outdated children’s toy, elections director Lisa Welch emerged from a back room holding a hammer and a white rubber mallet—her favorite office tools, she said with a smile.

Election administration requires a rare comnation of skills: facility with ever-changing legal statutes, an ability to calm the nerves of tense and confused voters, knowledge of the various IT systems that support registration databases and equipment, management of a large team of usually elderly and often poorly-trained poll workers, and patience for a healthy dose of mind-numbing clerical work. In Holmes County, those tasks fall to Welch, her deputy director and two part-time staff members. Welch likes to say she’s a mechanic as much as anything, however, considering all the time she puts in keeping the aging machines running.